Compassionate Corps Assists Troubled : Volunteers Help With Hospital’s Mental Patients

The 14-year-old who had tried suicide hadn’t spoken to anyone since being admitted to the locked ward at Brea Hospital Neuropsychiatric Center. When volunteer Marguerite Davis first saw her, she knew the patient needed something other than conversation.

Instead of trying to engage the girl in talk, Davis spent an hour gently brushing the adolescent’s hair and polishing her nails. Toward the end, the girl spoke just a few words, words that indicated she was a victim of sexual abuse.

On an evening visit the next week, Davis again felt drawn to the girl. This time she began talking to her in a non-threatening way. After a while the 14-year-old burst into tears and said: “I can’t understand why, if my dad loved me, he could have done this to me for so many years.”

“I knew I was treading on dangerous ground,” the 55-year-old La Habra resident recalled. However, she encouraged the girl to speak. In the report Davis later wrote of the encounter, she was able to provide background information no one had previously drawn out of the child.

The Breakthrough

“Suddenly you get the report; suddenly you get the breakthrough,” Davis said. “Often the volunteers can get next to (patients) and get information out where the psychiatrist cannot. I just love them (patients), and I think the love comes through. You should never go into something like that without love. You need a firm kind of love. And don’t turn your back too long,” she added, laughing.

This is National Volunteers Week, and many companies and nonprofit agencies around the county will honor those who have donated time and energy all year long. Davis is not scheduled to win any awards (although each of the hospital’s volunteers will receive a rose and a mug from their supervisor). Nevertheless, for eight years she has been the kind of unpaid worker the week was meant to honor.

An unusual volunteer in an unusual volunteer program, Davis enters the private hospital’s locked ward, where the most severe cases are held, about once a week. Few of the facility’s core of 50 volunteers are comfortable in that environment (most opt to work in the open wards) and few have undergone as intense a training program as has Davis. A special education teacher who works during the day at Lanterman State Hospital, a Pomona facility for mentally retarded people, Davis had a year’s volunteer training at the Brea hospital. Closely supervised at first, she’s now “a sort of free spirit” who sets her own visiting hours and goes where the need is greatest, she said.

“She’s the only one (volunteer) to really understand where they’re at on the locked unit,” admitted Jan Briley, the hospital’s director of volunteers, who trained Davis. Briley is a salaried staff member. “She’s the only one to really follow through with a patient on the locked unit. Her training went further” than that of most volunteers, said the administrator. Those who want to work individually with patients usually undergo a 10-week training course in which the requirements can be altered to fit the volunteer’s talents and abilities. (In most other Orange County psychiatric hospitals, volunteer opportunities for working one-to-one with inpatients are rare, but a number of alternative opportunities for mental health volunteers do exist. See accompanying article.)

At Brea Hospital, volunteers work in 17 different programs under Briley’s supervision. Among those individual and group activities are grooming, literacy tutoring, sewing, needlecraft, relaxation therapy, songwriting, dance instruction and the coordination of special events, such as a recent party sponsored by the Fullerton Elks Club. Volunteers also help on excursions away from the hospital, handle paper work, staff the front office information desk and work in a Christian therapy program with patients who have requested such treatment. What’s needed varies from time to time. According to Briley, “One of the keys to being a volunteer in a psychiatric hospital is flexibility.”

As a long-term volunteer, Davis is granted an unusual amount of freedom. She sets her own hours, coming in when she has time, and usually determines for herself which patients she wants to work with. Knowing who she can approach “is instinctive, if you’ve been in the field long enough,” Davis said. “I pray a lot before I go to the ward: ‘Lord, lead me . . . tonight.’ ” Nevertheless, not every patient responds to her concern. “If they don’t like you, they’ll just walk right out of the room. It doesn’t earn them any points” to talk with a volunteer, she added.

“I consider myself a catalyst, to get in oftentimes where the psychiatrist cannot get in, to establish rapport, to make them think,” said the volunteer. “I don’t give advice unless they ask me as another human being.” Volunteers are not supposed to do actual therapy with patients, she said; those services are provided by professional staff.

“They (the patients) always say, ‘What, you’re doing this with no pay?’ That’s the part they like. I would be down here every night if I were able to; it’s my favorite place to be. It’s my second home. It’s the most rewarding thing in my life outside of my children and my grandchildren.”

Volunteers at Brea range in age from high school students to senior citizens. One long-term volunteer, Larry Vanderberg, arrives at Brea Hospital Neuropsychiatric three afternoons a week to lead combination dance-aerobics classes. Active in the program since late 1981, the 33-year-old Fullerton resident initially became involved to earn three units toward a bachelor’s degree in psychology. That class ended long ago. Now Vanderberg is working for a master’s degree in industrial psychology. He’s also substitute teaching around the county in special education schools, teaching dance professionally at several studios and occasionally taking dancing parts in films. But the teacher, whose screen credits include a role in the movie “Staying Alive,” still gives about 10 hours a week to the hospital’s patients.

“I like the place. I like the work that’s done there; I like the people there. It makes you feel good. You can see the changes; you know you’re being effective; you’re not just walking through life doing nothing,” he said. He works on both the open and closed wards, with adolescents and with adults, mostly dealing with patients in groups rather than individually.

But he’s watched particular individuals grow and has had the satisfaction of believing his own efforts sometimes contributed to that growth, he said. In one instance, a troubled, introverted youth seemed to adopt him as a part-time father. “He had no father image; he was having a lot of problems with his sexual identity,” Vanderberg said. “He started working out hard in the classes, and he would come and talk to me after class. Apparently after he left (was discharged from the hospital), he went to his (high school sports) coaches and started practicing. Maybe that had just a little to do with what he was getting from me.”

Another former student stayed in dance classes after discharge and eventually got a job at a dance studio, Vanderberg said. Then there are the adult patients who sometimes tell the teacher his class is “the only thing that made them feel good all day.”

Strongly positive results from his work “happen only about once every four months, but that’s often enough for me to say, ‘I’m contributing to somebody’s life,’ ” said the Fullerton dancer.

Thelma Tavis of Brea works with the hospital about 20 hours a week, most weeks. She chats informally with individual patients, helps them start and finish sewing projects, gives them grooming tips and makes hospital clothing for them. Some she helps find jobs and schooling after they’re discharged.

Tavis has worked with open ward patients at the hospital without pay for 10 years. Why? “Can’t you tell by the look on my face?” she asked, beaming. “I get a great deal of satisfaction and enjoyment from this. Sometimes if you listen to other people and put in a word of encouragement, it helps you,” she added.

An artist and one-time ranch manager who now works part time as an antiques saleswoman, Tavis had been a hospital volunteer in Northern California for 30 years before she moved to Orange County a decade ago. Almost at once she saw a newspaper article about the Brea hospital and decided to call. She calls herself “a professional volunteer. I don’t know, I’ve been so busy volunteering I didn’t have time to work” at a full-time job, she said.

“My whole thing is motivation, and I think in a psychiatric facility that’s it (the main need),” she said. She said she quietly encourages patients to develop their creative abilities through craftwork. “It’s relaxing. Maybe they’ve been in a heavy therapy group. This (crafts) slows them down,” she said. When in doubt about which patient most needs her attention, she and other volunteers ask the head nurse, Tavis said. “We ask, who needs our tender loving care today? And it might be some old gentleman, or some young person, or someone who’s just . . . ,” she jangled her fingers expressively.

Not every volunteer is cut out to work one-to-one with patients, Briley said, although most approach the program with that desire. Certain qualities and abilities are required of psychiatric voluntary workers, and a screening process takes place during 30 hours of training scheduled over a 10-week period.

Volunteers first learn the hospital layout. They are taught medical terminology pertinent to psychiatric patients and are instructed in safety rules and basic procedures and policies. Appropriate candidates for this kind of work, Briley said, must be able to deal with patients’ occasional hostility. They must also be able to understand cultural differences, to accept that some patients will get worse instead of better and to accept that patients will sometimes blame them for things they haven’t done.

Above all, the administrator said, “The very important thing for a volunteer is to never counsel. But you must always be totally supportive.”

When Briley first became involved with Brea Hospital Neuropsychiatric, she was a volunteer herself. As community service chairwoman for the Fullerton Emblem Club (affiliated with the Fullerton Elks), she was responsible for providing support services to the psychiatric facility. The Emblem Club had adopted the hospital as its major service project.

By 1971 Briley had moved into a hospital staff position to develop plans for a strong volunteer program. By 1972 that program was under way. Because it is unusual for volunteers to work directly with psychiatric inpatients, initially there was strong resistance to the concept from many doctors, Briley said. But today “I don’t know a single doctor (at the Brea hospital) who wouldn’t want a volunteer” to work with his or her patient.

Christy King has been one of those volunteers for the last four years. Because she has not yet worked individually with patients, she did not go through “any really structured training,” King said. “It’s been very informal. Jan was willing to work with me, which meant (helping me) stick my toe in gently. She let me add on (duties) at my own pace.”

Plans to Undergo Training

At first King spent several hours, three days a week, staffing the front office information desk and directing visitors to their destinations. Now she visits the hospital on Tuesday nights to lead bingo games and on Friday evenings to show movies. This summer she plans to undergo training with Literacy Volunteers of America. She will use that training to improve language skills of appropriate patients at the Brea hospital.

Why add such voluntary, unpaid labor to her full-time job with a medical supply company? Unconsciously, King echoed a common sentiment among volunteers. “People who have the time should give something back,” she said. “I don’t mean to sound sanctimonious, but giving back is what keeps the world going round.”